Apologies for the break in blogging recently, have been a little busy. Was watching TV last night and came across one of those ubiquitous ‘the Top Ten ____s of all time!’ shows. This reminded me of probably the most famous example of this genre, the Ten Commandments.
Now, the Ten Commandments are quite popular among the fans of Abraham, who at least claim to constitute about half of the world’s human population. But what’s interesting is that as well as this, there are plenty of non-Abrahamists, or people lukewarm about Abrahamism, who nevertheless say that this collection of instructions are in some sense ‘a good guide’ to morality, a good expression of ‘moral basics’, or even ‘the foundations of our civilisation’ (meaning that in a good way).
This seems odd to me, since the Ten Commandments actually seem a very good example of an immoral document, one that gives very bad moral advice. Indeed, I think society would be much improved if they ceased to be anybody’s ‘moral basics’. So I thought I’d briefly explain why I think they’re so wrong.
